The Metaphysical Limit: the Depicted and the Happening

There is often confusion caused by ignorance of one of the metaphysical limits discovered by the Greeks — a limit a person encounters in the acts of their happening thinking and non-thinking, which thinking can grasp, but only as thinking.

Our very presence presupposes a special boundary — the limit of the impossibility of knowing what is happening in its actual state. All that we know of ourselves and of what is happening is only a particular mode of thinking: different forms of thinking — bodily or otherwise. Very conditionally, our spiritual condition may be divided into “reason” or “rationality,” but in truth this is a drastic simplification. For example, the schema of German idealism — sensibility, understanding, reason — is merely a simplification, not what truly occurs in its ultimate sense.

A profound misconception of all radical teachings, as well as of those who critique them, lies in the failure to realize that “the patterns of our thinking are not what happens without thinking.”

This weakness gives rise to two unfolding problems:

• On the one hand, the failure to recognize that “knowledge of what is happening” is not “what is happening.”
• On the other hand, the first error leads to radical thinking (Marxism, positivism, Freudianism, but also the anti-…), where “limited thinking” (isolation, formula) is assumed to be “the happening itself.”

For example, when the formula thesis—antithesis—synthesis is used to explain everything — both within thought and outside it — and this simplification is extended across all knowledge: theoretical physics, human history, and so on. When it is discovered that this is not the case, and that the “radical formula” that has arisen is not the kind of thinking that can itself become what is happening, a crisis emerges for those unable to perform the ultimate act of differentiation with their thinking — an act requiring a special philosophical meditation.

The constant unraveling of this limit is what philosophy itself is about. It serves as a universal critique, capable of breaking apart the stone of any radical scholasticism or, conversely, of any anti-scholasticism, which has forgotten that it is always merely another manifested thought (depiction), and not the happening (non-thinking).

The formula — “the patterns of our thinking are not what happens without thinking” — demands a meta-pause and a subsequent meditative pause.

Or again: “the radical formula cannot become happening” — then pause, and meditate anew.

© Rusnak Alexey, 2025. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Rusnak, A. (2025). The metaphysical limit: the depicted and the happening. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17237367